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Sunday, December 7, 2014

"Speakeasy" Update - Antedating "Speak Easy Shop"

“Speakeasy” Update - Speak Easy, Mate -

An Antipodal Antedating of
“Speak Easy Shop”

In a recent post, I surveyed the
history and etymology of the word “speakeasy,” denoting an unlicensed seller of
liquor.Speakeasies are most familiar in
pop-culture, as places where flappers danced and mobsters sold booze during Prohibition
in the United States, in the 1920s and into the 1930s.

The word was first popularized in
the United States after a widely reported crackdown on unlicensed alcohol
sellers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1889.The term, “speak easy shop,” in the sense of an unlicensed alcohol
vendor, appeared in print in England as early as 1844.The term, “speak softly shop,” appeared in England
in 1823, but not necessarily as an unlicensed seller of alcohol.A slang dictionary defined the term as, “the house of a smuggler.”

“Speak easy,” seems to have been
an Irish expression, equivalent to the more English, “speak softly;” both
meaning to speak quietly.The suggestion
is that an unlicensed shop is the sort of place you do not want to be heard
talking about, or that the types of people who frequent them are they types of
people who have things to say that they do not want others to hear.

I am a publican residing a
considerable distance in the interior, and notwithstanding the many and
numberless difficulties I have to surmount in bringing spirits from Sydney,
payment of license, subject to fines, Colonial regulations as to Government
servants, bushrangers, &c.I feel
myself most seriously annoyed in my business by what are termed private grog
sellers, or, as the fancy style them, speak easy shops, who set at defiance all
attempts of the Magistracy to put them down.

The Sydney Gazette and
New South Wales Advertiser, September 15, 1829 page 3 (the same letter was
reprinted in the Sydney Monitor
twice, October 3, 1829 (page 4) and October 5, 1829 (page 4)).

The term, “speak easy shop,” and its
use to denote unlicensed pubs or saloons, are both much older than had been
known.